This is my first post here. I am a delicate flower so please be gentle.

We've all watched with various degrees of bemusement the smelly retards Occupying ZOMGEverything LOL™. As fun as it is to point and laugh, there is an underlying context that is decidedly not funny.

Follow along and tell me how you think this story ends.

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Posted by: Guest Blogger at 11:18 AM | Comments (300)
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Before you watch this clip (via Jim Geraghty), I want you to understand something: this is Joe Biden, Vice President of the United States of America. This is the guy hand-picked by then-Senator Barack Obama to be his wingman. This is the guy that was to have Obama's back; the person that Obama would trust with the keys; the man who the President could rely on, no matter what. And not just from the point of view of the Presidency: with this pick Barack Obama made it clear that, in his judgment, Joe Biden was the best, most reliable choice out there for the Democratic party.

Got that?

Good. Now watch:

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Posted by: Guest Blogger at 10:52 AM | Comments (103)
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Nah, just kidding. They are outraged. Nay! OUTRAGED! That Scott Brown responded in a joking way to a shot Elizabeth Warren took at him. (Warning, the link goes to a liberal blogger at the Washington Post but at least it's not Jennifer Rubin).

During the Massachusetts Senate debate earlier this week, Elizabeth Warren and the other Dem candidates were reminded by the debate moderator that Scott Brown had posed nude in college, and asked what they had done to pay for school. ”I kept my clothes on,” Warren joked, to laughter from the crowd.

Today, Scott Brown was asked by a local Massachusetts radio show to comment on Warren’s joke, and he offered his own joke in response: “Thank God.”

But then he got really sexist.

No, I tell a lie. That's all he said.

At the link the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Democratic Party goes after Brown.

Scott BrownÂ’s comments send a terrible message that even accomplished women who are held in the highest esteem can be laughingly dismissed based on their looks

You see it's perfectly fine for Elizabeth Warren to take a shot at Scott Brown for how he used his looks in college but he can't take a joking shot back at her. It's always tough for a man to run against a woman simply because even after all the years of hearing "we're all equal", we're not. If Warren were a guy who looked like Ted Kennedy and Brown said the same thing no one would care. In fact, weren't we just treated to a week or so of "Christie is fat" jokes from liberals? Yeah, we were. In fact, Christie was asked about that repeatedly at his "No means no" presser. He dealt with it head on and didn't whine he was being picked on.

If male and female candidates are too be treated equally, then they need to be treated equally. Are there jokes and jabs that cross the line? Of course but again, it's needs to go both ways and be enforced equally against both parties. I'm really not interested in a set of rules where vile attacks against GOP women are acceptable and the mildest of jokes against a liberal woman is cause for banishment from polite society.

Was Brown's crack ungentlemanly? Of course it was. Was Warren's unladylike? At least as much so and probably a bit more since she as any 4th graded would note, she started it!

But this is politics and gentlemanly and ladylike behavior isn't usually part of the process.

But forget all of this. The important thing to remember is Warren is a danger to the country, not because of her jokes or her looks but because she's a collectivist who is far outside the traditional understanding of what America is about. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 10:36 AM | Comments (92)
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Inspiring, as always. This is definitely worth a watch today. Quite a life story. The full text is available here if you're at work. There are a few clunkers on here, but Mactrast has a good roundup of notable reactions to his passing.

[Additional thoughts from Andy:] As a tech-geek from way back, the Mac didn't interest me at all until OS X got it running a real operating system (i.e., UNIX) and they ditched Motorola for Intel CPUs. Now, just a few short years later, I have a house full of Macs, iPods, iPads and iPhones and one poor little Windows PC that's hanging on for dear life.

As the chief tech support guy at home, this has made life immeasurably easier. Thanks, Steve Jobs.

But what I really wanted to add to this post has to do with Apple as a force for unbridled capitalism. Kevin Williamson at NRO has a good piece on the same topic that I'll just quote from:

Jobs was sometimes criticized for not being a philanthropist along the lines of Bill Gates ... [but] Mr. Jobs’s contribution to the world is Apple and its products, along with Pixar and his other enterprises, his 338 patented inventions — his work — not some Steve Jobs Memorial Foundation for Giving Stuff to Poor People in Exotic Lands and Making Me Feel Good About Myself. Because he already did that: He gave them better computers, better telephones, better music players, etc. In a lot of cases, he gave them better jobs, too. Did he do it because he was a nice guy, or because he was greedy, or because he was a maniacally single-minded competitor who got up every morning possessed by an unspeakable rage to strangle his rivals? The beauty of capitalism — the beauty of the iPhone world as opposed to the world of politics — is that that question does not matter one little bit.

Spot on! Steve Jobs acting in what Adam Smith referred to as his "rational self-interest" produced products that people wanted because they made their lives better. Whether Jobs was an angel or an SOB was irrelevant.

And a specific example - even though no one at Apple sat down to design a computer for helping teach kids with autism, the iPad has begun to dislocate specialized therapy devices costing 10 times as much, putting needed technology in reach of families who value it for much more productive pursuits than playing Angry Birds.

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Posted by: Guest Blogger at 09:45 AM | Comments (176)
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Good Day, my spastic, socially clumsy darlingheads.

We haven't had one of these for a long time! It's been pretty Newsy around here.
Your imaginations must be all cramped up from sitting too long. Need a stretch?

We here at the HQ exist merely to serve your loathsome fancies.

Multimedia contest. Writing, P-shop, video, interpretive dance, fingerpaints, what-have-you. Five rules: is it has to be 1) Funny, and 2) Safe For Work.

Three, four, five:

What does Ace do on vacation?

Funny stuff gets promoted to the front page of a Very Smart Military Blog.
There could be imaginary awards and phony ceremonies, but you should just do it for the Glory.

Posted by: LauraW at 08:15 AM | Comments (243)
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So the SCOAMF has a presser scheduled for 11 am. Forget him, let's make fun of his supporters instead. We make fun of these freaky protesters because we can.

Here you have someone named Xiaojie Liu, who we'll call the face of the Occupy Boston Movement. Dude sure looks like he won't be needing caffeine any time soon. His fellow anti-capitalists appear quite amused.

The Boston Herald has a story on the self-important, pablum-puking pinheads and their self-serving drivel about being the 99%. It's really getting tedious. more...

Posted by: Guest Blogger at 07:58 AM | Comments (178)
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He's actually on time.

Talking about his jobs bill. Says it will get a vote in the Senate next week. We'll see.

Now he's saying that passing this will be a buffer against any shock from Europe.

A reminder, Senate Democrats refused to take up his bill when Mitch McConnell offered to and are now reworking all the tax hikes into a surtax on millionaires.

Interesting, he's talking about pressuring "Senators" not Reid or Democrats when it comes to passing his Son Stimulus . No mention of Eric Cantor who he went after earlier this week.

Now he's saying how brave and awesome he is.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:00 AM | Comments (436)
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The Wall Street Journal ran a great article this weekend discussing how Twitter has become an important resource for both researchers and scientists. Twitter is now being used to track political campaigns and activity, gauging box-office movie and television buzz, predicting the stock market moves, even monitoring natural disasters.

When Virginia's magnitude 5.8 earthquake hit last August, the first Twitter reports sent from people at the epicenter began almost instantly at 1:51 p.m.—and reached New York about 40 seconds ahead of the quake's first shock waves, according to calculations by the social media company SocialFlow. The flood of messages peaked at 5,500 tweets a second.

Compared with information from cellphone records and social-media sites, Twitter texts are as timely as a pulse beat and, taken together, automatically compile the raw material of social history.

The first terse tweets also outpaced the U.S. Geological Survey's conventional seismometers, which normally can take from two to 20 minutes to generate an alert. The agency is now experimenting with Twitter as a faster and cheaper way to track earthquakes.

Never have scientists had so much readily accessible, real-time data about what people say. Twitter, the service that allows users to send text updates of up to 140 characters out to the public, publishes more than 200 million messages, or tweets, a day. Compared with information from cellphone records and social-media sites, Twitter texts are as timely as a pulse beat and, taken together, automatically compile the raw material of social history.

I know many of you have been reluctant to jump into Twitter, but I highly recommend it. After ridiculing it as useless celebrity nonsense at first, I find myself getting more and more of my news and information from Twitter. It's very easy to tailor your feed to your own specific interests. For example, I follow web designers and developers, Yankees, Giants and PGA beat writers, racist homophobic hatemongers right-wing bloggers, political journalists and news outlets, and tech magazines.

Take a look at this chart showing political activity from the left and right:

Quit lurking, Twitter lurkers and go sign up so you can join in the fun. Do you really want to be the last person to know that Anthony twittered his weiner? Not me; I don't want to live in that world.

For those that want desktop clients instead of the browser interface: Here are the best for Mac, PC and Linux. Don't forget both iPhone and Android have official Twitter apps for when you're on the go. I recommend disabling email notifications.

I've included some must-follows below the fold along with an infographic explaining the basics (sign up for Twitter first, then click the links and hit "follow").

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Posted by: Guest Blogger at 05:38 AM | Comments (176)
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RIP Steve Jobs. Jobs was a man who can honestly be numbered in the ranks of the worldÂ’s great industrialists/captains of industry. I disliked his monomaniacal effort to turn Apple's digital world into a "walled garden", but I admired the hell out of his uncanny ability to create whole markets nearly out of thin air, and to ruthlessly out-compete his adversaries. In an industry where razor-thin margins are the norm, Apple was able to carve out 10% profit margins on a regular basis. Much of the modern electronic landscape looks the way it does now because of Steve Jobs and Apple.

War on the young: Greece exiles the future. Walter Russell Meade asks, "Do welfare states always end by eating their young?" Given the evidence so far, the answer is yes. And the young 'uns so far are going rather placidly to the slaughter.

The government pisses away more of your tax dollars chasing the green unicorn.

Harry Reid: Squeeze those rich bastards! SQUEEZE THEM! How dare they presume to have a lot of money! The gall! But, er, leave me and my friends alone because we use our money for stuff Democrats like.

The Greek people sit down and calmly and rationally decide how to deal with their financial crisis. Hah! Just kidding. They're striking and rioting again. Because they've had so much success with that tactic in the past, I guess.

Apparently, Peter Orszag is not a fan of John Lee Hooker’s “House Rent Blues”.

Occupy Wall Street? I donÂ’t know what to say about this collection of layabouts, neÂ’er-do-wells, professional agitators, hippies, yippies, academics, naive college kids, stoners, boners, groaners, red-diaper babies, trust-fund socialists, idiots, idjits, fidgets, New Age freaks, anarchists, union thugs, post-modern relativists, lookie-loos, journalists, and random stupid people. Additional commentary simply seems unwarranted -- listent to them yammer, shake your head, and go about your (productive) business. Think of it this way: if these people had something more important to do or somewhere more important to be, they wouldnÂ’t be standing around in the middle of a workday shouting nonsense.

Some rare good news: Obama finally ratified a pending free-trade agreement with South Korea. (And this is good news in spite of the “lost jobs” moaning from the usual suspects.)

It’s something I’ve noticed myself for many years: in modern cinema, the bad guys are always the businessmen and industrialists while the good guys are always the public-sector folks -- cops, firemen, D.A.’s, FBI agents, and so on. Why is that? Yes, there are exceptions (Iron Man, Batman) but not many. And what about the dearth of war movies based on our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan? The few that we have gotten are lefty fantasies of US perfidy; the single good combat film (“The Hurt Locker”) was well-received but drew no imitators. The siege of Fallujah and Ramadi would make for an excellent combat film, but so far...nothing. Compare this dearth of film with past wars -- even the hated Vietnam war spawned hundreds of movies and television shows.

Rhode Island court asked to overturn ruling that pension benefits are a contractual right. I doubt the courts will do it, however necessary it will be, especially in a deep-blue state like RI. Still, money that can't be paid out, won't be, regardless of what the courts decide.

John Tamny at RealClearMarkets applies the concept of "Schumpeterian destruction" to the jobs market rather than industry itself.

[T]he paradoxical truth is that the fastest path to true job creation is one that seeks to reduce labor costs through job cuts.

To understand why, we must remember that all jobs are a function of investment. Investment is first and foremost attracted to profits, so when philosopher kings talk up their plans for creating jobs, they're missing the essential point that investors seek commercial situations where companies can produce as much as possible with as little in the way of labor costs as possible.

The Bank of England liked our QE party so much they decided to throw one of their own.

Annals of the boned: California's wild ride. more...

Posted by: Monty at 04:43 AM | Comments (133)
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